As I’ve said before, if you wanted to show that your product was the height of modernity in the 19th century, it had to be made by steam. Witness Fred Carr & Son’s Greenbush Steam Cracker and Biscuit Manufactory. It had previously been J. Whiting’s cracker factory, at Second Avenue and Washington in what is …

Once, it might have been the most important transportation intersection in the United States: the spot where the Erie Canal opened into the Hudson River. Here, barges carrying grain and hundreds of other products from the Great Lakes region had to be lifted from mule-drawn packet boats the plied the canal and moved onto sailing …

I don’t have a date for this postcard, which features the first Dunn Memorial Bridge, a lift bridge dedicated August 19, 1933, replacing the Greenbush Bridge. By the opening of the Dunn, Greenbush was a memory, consolidated along with Bath-on-Hudson and East Albany into the City of Rensselaer. This is the approach to the bridge …

Not surprisingly, in its heyday the Collar City (and neighboring Cohoes, the Spindle City) generated a lot of waste fabric. But in 1895, very little waste was allowed to go to waste, and the cast-off cotton and wool of the collar and shirt bosom industries was collected up for a variety of uses. Paper, for …

In 1935, the bowling and billiard hall that Erve managed was in the Hall-Rand building on the northwest corner of Congress and Third Streets in Troy. This was the former Rand’s Hall, later Rand’s Opera House, expanded in 1872 as a concert room, lecture hall and place of exhibitions. How Rand’s Hall became “Hall-Rand,” or …

The other day we mentioned that Ketchum’s Gentlemen’s Furnishing Store was, in addition to being a purveyor of shirt bosoms of superior quality, an agent for the Wheeler & Wilson sewing machine. It shouldn’t be any surprise that there are numerous advertisements for sewing machines in the Collar City’s directory for 1870 — sewing was …

Today Troy’s Pottery District is a combination of history and artisans, and there are a number of people in the area creating distinctive works for sale in the River Street shops. But in 1870, “Troy Pottery” meant something else entirely. We’re talking sewage. But clearly W.J. Seymour’s yard at the corner of Ferry and William …

What was showing at the Lyceum Theatre in Amsterdam of an October evening in 1918? Why, “Queen of the Sea.” They had me with “Thrilling Escape From Tower of Knives and Swords” — a woman being attacked by ferrets is just gravy. But darn! No vaudeville!

Well of course I couldn’t talk about Wallace’s without mentioning its across-the-street complement, The Carl Company. One of Schenectady’s home-grown department stores, it opened in 1906 and was owned by the Carl family until 1984. Defying the trend of amalgamations and consolidations, it managed to survive into the early ’90s with a number of suburban …

Why, Ketchum’s Gentlemen’s Furnishing Store, of course. In case you thought he was going to up and quit the business at any minute, A.M. Ketchum “would respectfully inform the citizens of Schenectady and vicinity that he will continue the manufacture of shirts, collars, bosoms of superior quality, and keep constantly on hand a general assortment …